Women's and Children's Quarters in Golden Gate Park,San Francisco

This paper explores the mythic domesticity encoded in the Children's Quarter in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. The play area, opened in 1888, represented a new genre of gender-specific public space developed in urban parks in the late nineteenth century. In welcoming women to the public domain of the urban park, gendered spaces such as the Children's Quarter signified a complex response to changing class and gender identities in the nineteenth-century city. Imposing a domestic structure on women's public presence, the Children's Quarter modeled a middle-class domestic ideal, affirming women's essential association with the private sphere even as it welcomed them to the public sphere of the urban park.     

‘The development of higher urban life’ and the geographic imagination: beauty, art, and moral environmentalism in Toronto, 1900–1920

The existence of school art leagues in Toronto, which sought to use beauty and art in the public schools as a means of sensitizing children to aesthetics, can be explained through their ideational affiliation with the city beautification impulse. In Toronto, a chief proponent of city beautification and the link between city beauty and school art was the painter, city planner, and art educator, George Agnew Reid, who regarded city beauty as more than an exercise in urban cosmetics; city beautification relied on extant beliefs in the morality of beauty and its putative efficacy as a shaper of human behaviour in the city, especially the ennoblement of the working and immigrant classes. The resulting ‘moral environmentalism’ of beautification changes the way we should think about early city planning, ultimately revealing the geographical imaginations of those contributing to the moral environmentalist milieu.     

Articulations of rule: landowners, revolution, and territory in Chiapas, Mexico 1920–1962

This article examines struggles over the spaces of landed property in north-central Chiapas. Engaging the work of Mexico's ‘new cultural history’ and geographic theorizing of the entanglements of space, hegemony, and territoriality, it argues against widespread representations of Chiapan landowners maintaining autonomous domains of domination ‘untouched’ by the Mexican Revolution. Rather, the contours of landed property were made and remade through the complex articulation of landowner, state, and indigenous territorialities. Based on this analysis, it concludes that territoriality—as the diverse constellation of social–spatial practices through which space is bounded and these boundings sedimented with meanings—is both a central arena through which hegemony operates and a constant outcome of those struggles.     

Drought is normal: the socio-technical evolution of drought and water demand in England and Wales, 1893–2006

Water stress is becoming a permanent feature of life in Britain and other developed societies, and attempts to change ‘consumer behaviour’ are at the forefront of strategies for sustainability. This paper combines historical, geographical and sociological perspectives on the evolution of drought and water demand in modern England and Wales. Droughts have natural properties but their course, size and distribution is also the result of an interplay between governance, social norms and everyday practices. Focusing on seven significant droughts between 1893 and 2006, this article traces changing understandings of ‘normal’ water consumption and ‘rational’ demand and relates them to the evolving socio-technical management of water and identities of ‘the consumer’. We challenge the idea of a watershed between private supply (associated with passive ‘customers’) and public ownership (associated with active ‘citizens’). While private systems facilitated self-organised civic action more easily than public supply, the ideal of a citizen-contract blinded systems of public provision to the problem of expanding water use. An interdisciplinary analysis of droughts in the past offers lessons for the debate about sustainable consumption today.     

An ecology of postcoloniality: disciplining nature and society in Malaya, 1948–1957

This paper examines the territorialization of the Malayan rainforest by the British colonial authorities during the Malayan Emergency in the decade prior to political independence in 1957. Through the events of the Emergency the Malaysian rainforest was constructed as a space of fear and violence in opposition to the orderly rule of the state. Disassociation from the forest was the visible criterion of good or bad, and the struggle over land became recast as a moral struggle between good (the state) and bad (the Communists). The military campaign in the forest was accompanied by legislation designed to control and discipline the Malayan population in the urban areas especially those expelled from the forests and forcibly incarcerated in the ‘New Villages’. The result was an ecology that allowed the most efficient monopoly of violence by the state and of the means to discipline its subject-citizens.     

Gatekeepers of the Urban Commons? Vigilant Citizenship and Neoliberal Space in Multiethnic Paris

This article draws from ethnographic research on a recently built park in one of Paris' predominately West African and Maghrebi districts. It demonstrates how urban design is used to “build‐in” neoliberal subjectivities to the city. This design approach appropriates a tradition of street democracy held by neighborhood associations and redirects their disproportionately middle class, French membership into managerial roles traditionally held by municipal agencies. This neoliberal political subjectivity, which I term vigilant citizenship, makes monitoring and controlling the social composition of the urban commons a form of civic engagement for middle class urbanites. In Paris, this vigilance is fueled by anxieties over the presence of West African and Maghrebi youth in public spaces. Activists do not passively adopt this neoliberal role; they strike a delicate balance as gatekeepers, weighing inclusion against an expectation to maintain a “successful” public space conforming to a republican model of citizenship.     

‘Fighting from the fields’: developing the British ‘National Farm’ in the Second World War

The Second World War had a profound impact on British Agriculture, with state intervention at an unprecedented level cementing the idea of a ‘National Farm’ in both the popular and the governmental psyche. Critical attention has recently begun to refocus on this period, adding to the somewhat celebratory meta-narratives written in the official histories. Drawing from the practice of micro-historical research and recent work in geography that seeks to understand the production of the landscape ‘from within’, this paper explores how ‘small stories’ can afford an appreciation of the ‘complications of everyday existence’ and bring greater depth, nuance and understanding to these ‘larger’ historical events and their influence on the British countryside. Utilising oral histories from farms in Devon (UK), the paper explores the micro-geographies which shaped as well as destabilised the national farm message as it was translated into the local context.     

“非正常”的文化标签下“同志”社会空间的生产——以广州市X公园“同志渔场”为例

性少数群体对于城市空间的利用是城市研究中的新兴话题。这类研究主要探讨"非主流"的社会身份如何通过对特定的社会空间的利用,引发空间意义的生产及社会关系的建构。本文以广州市X公园的"同志渔场"为案例,研究男同性恋者对于城市公共空间的利用与体验。研究认为,X公园的"同志渔场"不仅给性少数群体提供了性身份暂时解放的空间,亦是其不断体验自身"非正常"的身份标签的空间。同志的空间实践体现的不是对于主流的社会规范的抵抗。相反,他们的空间实践是明显地处在"非正常"这一身份标签的作用之下的。     

Central Park against the streets: the enclosure of public space cultures in mid-nineteenth century New York

The industrialization of New York and its rise to economic dominance brought about a major restructuring of street life and unleashed an array of contradictory everyday urban cultures. In a still under-regulated environment, the commoning of public space became a key sociospatial capital that helped the working classes resolve their reproduction in a way the elite found disturbing and far removed from the civic order they were trying to instil. This article draws on recent theorizations of the commons/enclosure dialectic to develop a comparative analysis of the cultures of public space use vis-à-vis the practices prescribed by Central Park in its attempt to reform everyday spatialities. The park is understood here as an early episode in the project of imposing new social relations through the enclosure of public conduct—a first effort to tame the urban commons and prevent the subaltern appropriation of public space. Following a preliminary discussion of the economic and social determinants and configuration of the material cultures of public space use in Manhattan, the article studies the park's strategies as a special type of enclosure, consisting not of the usurping of common land for private profit but of the mobilization of public space to shift behaviors from one regime of publicity to another.     

The uncertain state of islands: national identity and the discourse of islands in nineteenth-century Britain and Greece

This paper explores some of the ways in which the island was mapped into the British and Greek national imaginaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From at least the seventeenth century the island, like the body, served as a model for the organisation of knowledge. The island functioned as an ideal body politic, in which political and cultural boundaries were congruent and readily defensible from invasion. In politically and geographically fragmented states the island became an important topos for resolving the problematic relations between nation and state, and between local knowledge and national unity. During the nineteenth century, national cultures were increasingly construed as autonomous, self-sustaining island spaces set apart from other communities beyond. From the second half of the century attention was also paid to those authentic ‘islands’ located within the nation-state. In this expanded topographical definition, the ‘island’ came to signify an identifiably different, contained and stable habitat. A relationship was sustained between these distinct spaces within the nation-state and the island as it was represented in biogeographical and evolutionary writings as a site for observing preserved life forms and diversification. Regional studies, for example, celebrated the survival of an indigenous national culture in geographically confined pockets. Emerging disciplines, such as folklore, sought to protect these spaces from the onslaught of a cosmopolitan modernity that threatened to overwhelm them. The island in this sense was a space in which ‘native’ customs might be preserved and, at the same time, a space in which potentially destructive, atavistic forces might be controlled and ultimately domesticated. It is here that the island emerges as an ambivalent, problematic place: at once a refuge and a prison, a place of innocent childhood adventure and of beastly aggression. Focusing on Britain and Greece as comparative case studies, the paper explores how this concern for internal ‘islands’ fed into and was reciprocally influenced by colonial encounters with ‘exotic’ island cultures.     

Breaking ground—marginality and resistance in (post) unification Germany

Drawing on postcolonial theory and recent geographical debates on subaltern speech and marginal positioning this paper asks what the relevance of ‘place’ is for attempts to ‘transgress’ and ‘resist’ the marginalisation of (former) East Germans in (post)unification Germany. My intention is not to equate the postcolonial situation with that of East Germany after unification, but rather to engage the theoretical and political insights of postcolonial critiques to highlight the conflicts and contradictions that emerge from attempts to move ‘beyond’ oppressive binary constructions. Questions of speaking and listening, as well as seeing and being seen are attended to with a strong focus on the paradoxical places and spaces within which they come to matter in contradictory ways. How do the practices of listening/speaking, seeing/being-seen function to place particular groups in the social margin or centre of ‘(re)united’ Germany? Does ‘power’ reside less with the speaker than with the listener, or is it still important to claim voice (rather than being ‘given’ voice) as an ‘other’?The paper tries to work through some of the tensions, conflicts and concerns that have emerged from my PhD research on the construction of East German marginality through media practices, but also in German social, cultural, political and academic discourse. Perhaps the most significant of these conflicts is that of having lost one’s politically bounded place (as a GDR citizen) and yet finding oneself reconstituted in the (symbolic as well as socio-economic and political) margin of a nation that, to this date, is described as ‘divided within itself’. The sense of placelessness becomes politically relevant when ‘resistant’ or ‘transgressive’ acts are (to be) performed that have no ‘proper’ place from which to embark or in which to be staged. Similar to the post-colonial situation, where no ‘original beyond’ exists, and despite being frequently posited as a symbolically separate entity, ‘East Germans’ have no place for return, only an impossible situation of being constantly ‘out-of-place’ even in the locales that used to be ‘home’.     

‘Facing the future’: tourism and identity-building in post-socialist Romania

Tourism is an important component of the process of identity-building, representing one way in which a country can seek to project a particular self-image to the wider international community. As such, tourism has considerable ideological significance for the formerly socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe that are seeking to project and affirm distinctly post-socialist identities as part of the process of re-integration into the political and economic structures of Western Europe. This paper focuses on tourism and identity-building in post-socialist Romania. In particular, it focuses on one building — the so-called ‘House of the People’ — which is intimately linked with Romania’s totalitarian past and which is fast becoming Bucharest’s biggest tourist sight. The presentation of the building to tourists seeks to ‘reconfigure’ its past so that it accords better with Romania’s post-socialist identity, and particularly its aspirations to (re)establish itself as a country of ‘mainstream’ Europe.     

Unpicking Sri Lankan ‘island-ness’ in Romesh Gunesekera's Reef

Through a close reading of the Anglo–Sri Lankan author Romesh Gunesekera's 1994 novel Reef, this paper interrogates the misplaced concrete-ness regarding Sri Lanka's status as archetypal ‘island-state’. I show how Reef maps an imaginative geography which both naturalizes and problematizes Sri Lankan ‘island-ness’. Through the memory of the novel's main protagonist the author's exploration of modernity fixes geographical knowledge of Sri Lanka. ‘Island-ness’ emerges as a rationalization of modernity, one with its roots in Sri Lanka's colonial experience which the author then unpicks as he proceeds to explore the limits of modernity. I suggest that Reef demonstrates how island-ness is an inescapable yet problematic dimension of contemporary Sri Lankan geography. This is an ambivalent contradiction that fuels a civil war in Sri Lanka which relentlessly and sanguinely contests the integrity of Sri Lankan island-ness. The paper emphasizes how Romesh Gunesekera's hybrid position, as an author born in Sri Lanka and now writing from England, constitutes a post-colonial intervention which allows us to ask new questions about Sri Lanka's ‘natural’ insularity. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.     

Barrio Women's Invited and Invented Spaces Against Urban Elitisation in Chacao,Venezuela

Outright victories against urban elitisation are rare in the current urban revolution. This article highlights how urban elitisation is confronted in Chacao, the most elite and urban part of Venezuela. Initially it reviews how this urban elitisation created the main economic, political and military strongholds of the opposition to the Bolivarian revolution. Then, in contesting it, the urban and Bolivarian revolutions feed each other through women's participation in invited and invented spaces of citizenship. From such spaces, Chacao women in their settler's movement organised struggles of insurgent citizenship to stop elitist urban renewal agendas and develop further forms of insurgent urbanism to conduct an urban renewal from below and establish a New Socialist Community for 600 families. They emerged as a revolutionary class to implement Bolivarian policies addressing the inefficiency and opportunism of the bureaucratic state and contesting urban elitisation with an anti‐capitalist and anti‐imperialist insurgent urbanism.     

Performing the Lodge: Masonry, masculinity, and nineteenth-century North American moral geography

Geographies reinforce gender and facilitate gender performativity. In this study of nineteenth-century Masonry, we demonstrate the influence of Masonic Temples in the promotion and performance of ‘Masonic masculinity.’ Masonry, through its design and construction of interior space, its embedded material symbolism and especially the geography of Masonic ritual itself, inculcated morality in prospective and raised Master Masons. Masonic Temple architecture and décor typify Victorian moral environmentalism vis-à-vis the parlor, the Masonic Lodge a domesticated male space where significant numbers of bourgeois men (and women) acted out a particular and peculiar masculine moral geography.     

A park of the people: the demotion of Platt National Park,Oklahoma

Platt National Park, Oklahoma, was the smallest national park in the United States until it was combined with an adjacent, reservoir-centered recreation site in 1976 to form Chickasaw National Recreation Area. Set aside as Sulphur Springs Reservation by agreement with the Chickasaw Indians in 1902 and designated a national park in 1906, Platt is the only American national park to be demoted since World War II. The story of Platt's creation and demotion reflects the changing mission of the National Park Service (NPS), shifting images of nature and recreation among the American public, and broader social forces that frame park purposes. What started as local boosterism of hydrotherapy in cold mineral springs grew into one of America's most visited national parks by the 1920s. Despite its popularity, Platt lacked both scenic grandeur and political influence; it did not fit prevailing images of wild nature among NPS bureaucrats and the urban elite who formed the core of the environmental movement; it was too small, too humanized, and too ordinary. As images of people embedded in nature have gained wider acceptance in recent decades, would this small, geographically distinctive, and culturally rich “park of the people” have met a similar fate today?     

Constructing a suburban identity: youth, femininity and modernity in late-Victorian Merseyside

Suburban growth was one of the main characteristics of late-nineteenth-century British towns, and a suburban lifestyle rapidly became the aspiration of a high proportion of urban dwellers. This paper explores the experience of one young woman growing up in a late-Victorian suburb, and assesses the ways in which she negotiated the structures of this emerging ‘modern’ environment, so as to construct her own identity and behaviour. Evidence is drawn from one very detailed diary covering the period 1884–1892, and attention is focused on three aspects of everyday life: public and social space; domestic routine; and friendships and relationships. The conventional view of middle-class suburban domesticity is challenged by evidence from this diary, which suggests that it was the public and social life of the suburb that was of particular importance to young women. While older married women's experiences were centred upon maintaining a respectable home, the provincial suburban environment offered to young single women considerable opportunities for independent mobility and action, which were restricted by relatively few familial constraints. The diarist did not fundamentally challenge the culture of middle-class suburbia, but instead was able to manipulate many social expectations to her own advantage. As a site of on-going development and malleable norms, late-nineteenth-century suburbia offered its young elite residents opportunities for a certain degree of social, cultural and spatial autonomy that was understood to be essential to the life of the nascent community.     

Overcoming obstacles on the peri‐urban fringe: young people making new geographies

Understanding contemporary youth lifestyles is a challenge for urban planners and geographers. Young people's everyday needs are complex, and urban spaces in new outer city developments offer unique spaces for shaping their identities. Juxtaposed with affordances of digital technologies, the physical location of home exists in a fluid landscape. Overcoming obstacles, such as access to public transport, places to socialise, and meet their peers, is characteristic of the everyday young person's experience. Knowing how young people decide where to go for personal space, as well as who to ask for personal advice, was the aim of this study. The study was conducted with samples of young people growing up in the rapidly growing peri‐urban northern suburbs of the Australian city of Melbourne. A survey questionnaire was administered to a gender‐balanced sample aged 12–15 years (n = 523) with follow‐up interviews to better inform the results. Logistic regression and factorial analyses of variance reveal their favourite places to be ‘my’ bedroom, being with friends, the park, and the café. Although not the focus of this study, some gender differences were noted. In addition to innovative use of space, the results show the positive influences on their well‐being of trusted family and friends. Young people's geographies offer transdisciplinary insights that highlight their creative usage of these new urban spaces. They offer a new imaginary for geographical education and research.     

‘Elementary aesthetics’, hedonist ethics: The philosophical foundations of Feuerbach's late works

In contrast to the conventional view of Ludwig Feuerbach as a left-wing Young Hegelian, this article argues that his primary contribution to philosophy is to be found in his later ethics, the basis of which may be discerned in his earlier writings. Over and above recent work on Feuerbach's aesthetics, his relation to Herder, and the relationship between aesthetics and ‘theological politics’ in his thought, Feuerbach's philosophy can re-evaluated, in relation to Epicurus and the French libertin tradition, as articulating an ethics of hedonism. In The Essence of Christianity (1841), the Nachlass fragment ‘Elementary Aesthetics’ (1843), and his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843) Feuerbach moves towards the vitalist materialist position that culminates in his (proto-Nietzschean) insight in ‘Against the Dualism of Body and Soul, Flesh and Spirit’ (1846) into the world as an ‘aesthetic phenomenon’, thus laying the foundations for his recognition of the centrality of sensuous pleasure to the ethical life.     

Blaming the Medici: Footnotes, falsification, and the fate of the ‘English Model’ in eighteenth-century Italy

Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the ‘English Model’ for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the ‘English Model’ beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesi's 1757–1758 translation of John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England. The ‘English Model’ was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the model's meaning, rejecting the need for protectionism and instead embracing a providential faith in laissez-faire. This tradition began with an important, but falsified footnote in Carlo Denina's 1769–1770 Rivoluzioni d’Italia. In this note and the tradition that adopted it, Lorenzo de’ Medici's imagined English wool factories became the locus of this inversion, and, through a reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, blaming the Medici as agents of Italy's aberrant historical development became an alternative to blaming English economic imperialism in late eighteenth-century Italy. The narrative of Medici involvement in the decline of Italy was finally realigned with Genovesi's original intention under the auspice of Pope Pius VI in 1794.